Coronavirus. The n(in)th sequel.

[The_J]

I'd need to look details up, but in general also on DNA you basically need a specific anchor where replication can start, and this just doesn't happen anywhere. The body should also get rid of the exogenous DNA, since it will be recognized as foreign.

I guess there's a chance that it could get integrated randomly, but that chance should be really small, and even then the cells will probably be killed in the long run by T-killer cells.

EDIT: The mechanism is so that in general all cells will represent to the outside a digest what's inside of them (not all at once, always a random selection). If anything unusual is detected, what doesn't belong to the body (e.g. during a virus infection), then the cell will be killed. This applies to proteins transcribed from the DNA (well, from the RNA translated from the DNA), and not DNA itself though, but since we need protein for anything to happen, this should still apply.

 

[Zardnaar]

Canada originally had supply issues as well... Murica blocked our orders.

Mass vaccination started here a month ago roughly.

Australia bet on Astra Zeneca but changed their mind.

 

[Zelig]

b) Australian police are illegally using QR check-in data to solve crimes.

This seems pretty ubiquitous. Police can't be trusted with that kind of access to data. Ontario police used COVID-19 database illegally, civil rights groups find

 

[Arwon]

USA had a massive vaccine advantage, now blown past by the EU and Canada, with Japan not far behind, and even Brazil possibly on the path to overtaking. Australia is behind as well. I'm not really sure where we will end up. Seems to be a fair few vocal anti-vaxxers, and I don't know if the Government will actually do proper mandates. But not quite as many crazies as the US.

Why the US is bad? It has millions of people like this. A bunch of people like this here.

Australia is going to blow past 80% and, like the ACT, many parts will get to 90%.

Queensland may struggle.

As of a couple weeks ago, in the ACT over 90% of that 30 to 40 cohort were either booked for an appointment or already jabbed too.

We will probably get to these sorts of levels in the southeast even before it becomes the case that unvaccinated people have a hard time going to pubs and restaurants. The opening up plans will likely involve only allowing vaccinated people to do these things at first - that should spurr a few more ppl to get around to it.

 

[Takhisis]

This seems pretty ubiquitous. Police can't be trusted with that kind of access to data. Ontario police used COVID-19 database illegally, civil rights groups find

Yeah, here already before the pandemic initiatives started such as forcing motorcyclists to wear helmets with their rides' plate number printed onto them (which hasn't actually helped battle bike-riding hitmen and muggers as stated) and also unavoidable cameras placed at highways to read everyone's movements. That, plus the new public transportation SUBE payment cards, which were promised to be anonymous by law and now provide a map of the entire city's movements which the government can secretly access on the basis of security grounds.

And then, during the pandemic, the new thing started: tracking everybody's cellphone to find out whether they've gone on holiday and then personalisedly sending them messages to tell them to get checked whenever movement is detected.

 

[Drakle]

Australia is going to blow past 80% and, like the ACT, many parts will get to 90%.

Queensland may struggle.

As of a couple weeks ago, in the ACT over 90% of that 30 to 40 cohort were either booked for an appointment or already jabbed too.

We will probably get to these sorts of levels in the southeast even before it becomes the case that unvaccinated people have a hard time going to pubs and restaurants. The opening up plans will likely involve only allowing vaccinated people to do these things at first - that should spurr a few more ppl to get around to it.

That's good to know. Where did you find these numbers? I've done some casual searching, and not found anything like this.

Also from personal experience, I know a lot of people who are double or even triple booked for Pfizer appointments, as they find newer ones and keep their previous booking for a while. I hope that isn't skewing the numbers.


Double Darwin award. Ivermectin isn't just killing people (or making them think they are safe, and thus dying from COVID). It's also possibly sterilising people.

Just one study, so take a big lump of salt. But it is ironic, given how a big part of the Anti Vaxxer conspiracy is about fertility.

 

[Arwon]

In the ACT at least it's a single booking queue through ACT Health, so won't be an issue with extra bookings there. Source is just Covidbase graphing the Department of Health data release.

 

[Zardnaar]

In the ACT at least it's a single booking queue through ACT Health, so won't be an nissue with extra bookings there. Source is just Covidbase graphing the Department of Health data release.

How bad is it in your day to day life? I lurk in r/Australia but it's not exactly unbiased.
Scomo down in the polls last I looked.

 

[Drakle]

In the ACT at least it's a single booking queue through ACT Health, so won't be an nissue with extra bookings there. Source is just Covidbase graphing the Department of Health data release.

Yeah, not the case at all in NSW. NSW Bookings are a basket case. My Dad and my Aunt separately spent weeks checking the booking systems of dozens of areas and hospitals to move up bookings and ended up getting their first shots in suburbs about 40minutes to 1-hour drive away. Meanwhile, AZ is just walking into my local GP, and out very quickly, no appointment.

How bad is it in your day to day life? I lurk in r/Australia but it's not exactly unbiased.
Scomo down in the polls last I looked.

He is down in the polls, but Turnbull and Morrison were down to similar numbers vs Shorten. Then the election happened, the media went full bore about Shorten's tax plan, while running cover for Morrison, and the LNP won again. Could also be a polling error, since COVID magnified polling errors for the US

The plan seems to be for Morrison to call the election, once the vaccination drive is done, and do an undeserved victory lap for the election. Despite being the one to sabotage the state governments, or encouraging their screwups, like with Gladys.

 

[Samson]

Australia is going to blow past 80% and, like the ACT, many parts will get to 90%.

Queensland may struggle.

View attachment 608302

As of a couple weeks ago, in the ACT over 90% of that 30 to 40 cohort were either booked for an appointment or already jabbed too.

We will probably get to these sorts of levels in the southeast even before it becomes the case that unvaccinated people have a hard time going to pubs and restaurants. The opening up plans will likely involve only allowing vaccinated people to do these things at first - that should spurr a few more ppl to get around to it.

All the values are given to 4 significant figures, but it maxes out at exactly 95%?

 

[Zardnaar]

Yeah, not the case at all in NSW. NSW Bookings are a basket case. My Dad and my Aunt separately spent weeks checking the booking systems of dozens of areas and hospitals to move up bookings and ended up getting their first shots in suburbs about 40minutes to 1-hour drive away. Meanwhile, AZ is just walking into my local GP, and out very quickly, no appointment.



He is down in the polls, but Turnbull and Morrison were down to similar numbers vs Shorten. Then the election happened, the media went full bore about Shorten's tax plan, while running cover for Morrison, and the LNP won again. Could also be a polling error, since COVID magnified polling errors for the US

The plan seems to be for Morrison to call the election, once the vaccination drive is done, and do an undeserved victory lap for the election. Despite being the one to sabotage the state governments, or encouraging their screwups, like with Gladys.

Labour is crap? I know the Aussie media is fairly right wing? 7,9 and Murdoch's bunch iirc?

 

[Arwon]

All the values are given to 4 significant figures, but it maxes out at exactly 95%?

Yeah they only give figures that high as <95% once it gets there, because the numerator and denominator are a bit imprecise.

One ACT age group (I think 70 to 75yo) has an apparent coverage of just over 100%.

The imprecision is due to different data sources. The numerator is a count of registered Medicare addresses, to assign vaccine recipients to states and territories. So if people haven't updated addresses with Medicare, they'll be assigned to the wrong place. My guess is a cohort of retiring Canberrans move somewhere warmer, and are not updating their Medicare address.

And they're using estimated population data from Bureau of Statistics from June last year, so people age into new cohorts, and the estimates may be a bit off because the last census was 2016 (the 2021 census is still getting collected).

 

[Samson]

Yeah they only give figures that high as <95% once it gets there, because the numerator and denominator are a bit imprecise.

One ACT age group (I think 70 to 75yo) has an apparent coverage of just over 100%.

The imprecision is due to different data sources. The numerator is a count of registered Medicare addresses, to assign vaccine recipients to states and territories. So if people haven't updated addresses with Medicare, they'll be assigned to the wrong place. My guess is a cohort of retiring Canberrans move somewhere warmer, and are not updating their Medicare address.

And they're using estimated population data from Bureau of Statistics from June last year, so people age into new cohorts, and the estimates may be a bit off because the last census was 2016 (the 2021 census is still getting collected).

The question then becomes how can they give values >90% to 4 significant figures if they cannot give >95% at all? This is the data scientist in me talking, rather than the public relations person.

 

[Arwon]

The question then becomes how can they give values >90% to 4 significant figures if they cannot give >95% at all? This is the data scientist in me talking, rather than the public relations person.

You'd have to ask the entirely unofficial producer of the chart, I don't think anyone is making policy off the 0.01% range here.

 

[Drakle]

Unless there is some other explanation for this, I think it is ironclad safe to say that Delta is far deadlier than the Alpha strain. Since I know some people dismissed India's carnage as them successfully avoiding bad outbreaks, until Delta. Meanwhile Florida never had a switch from hard restrictions, to open like India. Yet Florida's post vaccinating a lot of its most vulnerable is having DOUBLE the deaths of the peaks of the previous waves.

I mean to an extent, Florida seemed to have gotten lucky compared to some nearby states in the prior waves. But this seems really hard to explain, except Delta is deadlier.

https://twitter.com/VincentRK/status/1434857581164601350

Almost 25% of daily US COVID deaths are in Florida. This wave is striking because it is pretty hard to go above pre-vaccination waves. It's almost double.

Thankfully has not happened in any other state. In fact, very few countries have had this happen either.

We saw it in India: it's a combination of delta variant, policies, lack of masks and protective measures, crowding, overwhelmed hospitals.

India unfortunately did not have vaccines. Florida does. So it's all the more tragic.

The closest a US state has come so far to being in Florida's situation is Louisiana.

Even in countries with bad waves now, daily deaths per 100k are much lower, about half as much or lower in most.

25% of the US deaths, in a state that is only 6.5% of the total population of the US.

I'm really wondering what the 'real' Florida vaccination rate is. How many snowbirds and Latin American tourists taking vaccines could there be in terms of percentage across the entire state? A few percentage points is reasonable, but Florida is way out of line with other states, so it has a be a lot.

I mean they aren't doing a good job of vaccination

But what would be the carnage in Florida, if these were zero vaccinated, or much lower, like first segments of a rollout, like many countries in the global south are still in? At least those countries don't have as many old people as Florida, but they do still have a fair amount of middle-aged people, who are still getting killed in droves in Florida.

Anyway amid this carnage (which might finally be tapering off, but it is hard to tell, given they keep releasing their numbers oddly, then backfilling), Florida will fine businesses $5000 if they ask if ask about vaccine status, and copying Texas abortion bounty hunters. Because yeah, people still totally believe Pro-Life is a valid statement, in this climate.

 

[uppi]

The question then becomes how can they give values >90% to 4 significant figures if they cannot give >95% at all? This is the data scientist in me talking, rather than the public relations person.

They cannot, but don't want to admit that. I guess there is some value in giving values to 4 significant figures if you want to track small incremental changes, even if the accuracy is way lower than that.

Unless there is some other explanation for this, I think it is ironclad safe to say that Delta is far deadlier than the Alpha strain. Since I know some people dismissed India's carnage as them successfully avoiding bad outbreaks, until Delta. Meanwhile Florida never had a switch from hard restrictions, to open like India. Yet Florida's post vaccinating a lot of its most vulnerable is having DOUBLE the deaths of the peaks of the previous waves.

I mean to an extent, Florida seemed to have gotten lucky compared to some nearby states in the prior waves. But this seems really hard to explain, except Delta is deadlier.

But how does the Delta variant being deadlier explain Florida? If it were deadlier, it would be deadlier in other states as well.

I'm really wondering what the 'real' Florida vaccination rate is. How many snowbirds and Latin American tourists taking vaccines could there be in terms of percentage across the entire state? A few percentage points is reasonable, but Florida is way out of line with other states, so it has a be a lot.

I think you need to be careful with that. How exactly the graph looks depends on the time range from which you take the data. Cases don't peak at the same time, so if the Delta wave hit Florida earlier than other states (for example, there is no time frame mentioned, so I cannot check), the graph might be showing the dead people in Florida, but not those who are going to die in other states.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Opinion piece:

Is Moderna the Tortoise in the Vaccine Race?

By Marc Siegel

President Trump’s Operation Warp speed was often likened to the Manhattan Project, but this time the Americans and the Germans were on the same side. Germany had the BioN-Tech mRNA vaccine, backed by Pfizer; the U.S. had the Moderna shot, based on research conducted at a National Institutes of Health lab. The shots seemed so similar that Anthony Fauci, despite taking pride in the NIH’s work, told me he couldn’t choose between them.

Americans, including my patients, tended to lean toward BioNTech, perhaps because of its association with a famous American pharmaceutical brand. My hospital administered only Pfizer to begin with. It is the only Covid-19 vaccine so far to be fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration and was the first to receive emergency- use authorization for 16-year-olds, then 12-year-olds. The word on the medical street was that aches and fevers, headaches and muscle aches were more common with the Moderna shot.

But recent studies make the Moderna shot look better. A Belgian study of healthcare workers found that Moderna produced twice as many neutralizing antibodies as BioNTech/Pfizer. Similar results were found in a study from Virginia. A third study, from the Mayo Clinic, found that across Minnesota the Moderna vaccine was more effective at preventing infection.

Why? Several hypotheses bear further investigation. For one, the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine dosing is spaced only three weeks apart, puzzling vaccinologists with whom I’ve spoken. Every multiple-dose vaccine I administer has a longer interval between the first and second dose, from HPV (a month to a year, depending on age) and shingles (two to six months) to hepatitis A and B (six and one to two months, respectively). The second Moderna shot is administered after four weeks. A longer interval for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine— as was the practice in the U.K.—appears to provide more-durable immunity.

There is also a difference in the amount of active material each vaccine contains. Each BioNTech/Pfizer shot contains 30 micrograms of vaccine, compared with 100 micrograms for Moderna. That may give Moderna an advantage in signaling spike-protein production and a more robust T-cell and antibody response.

It seems to be more effective than Pfizer, perhaps because of the later second shot. The final results aren’t in, and the booster shots now being given by Pfizer and requested by Moderna will change the game at least one more time. Early data from Israel show that the third Pfizer/BioNTech shot decreased the relative risk of infection and severe illness by more than tenfold starting two weeks after administration.

Both shots are effective, but if Moderna ends up being the better one, it will be a tribute to American engineering and biotechnology.

Dr. Siegel is a clinical professor of medicine and medical director of Doctor Radio at NYU Langone Health, a Fox News medical correspondent, and author of “COVID: The Politics of Fear and the Power of Science.”

 

[Arwon]

I don't think Delta is believed to be much deadlier, it's just a hell of a lot more infectious.

 

[AmtrakQuebec]

Depends on how you define "deadlier".

 

[AmazonQueen]

Our government has denied it has any plans for making the October halfterm 2 weeks long or for a firebrake lockdown but refused to rule either out.
This I find entirely believable and not at all reassuring. After all it didn't plan the last 3 lockdowns and had to be forced into them.

How I wish a minister would say we have contingency plans but don't expect them to be necessary. Some evidence of thinking ahead rather than just reacting to events.